Novice Nook

The Chess Cafe is pleased to welcome Dan Heisman as one of its

regular columnists. A National Master, Dan is a full time chess
instructor in the Philadelphia area. He has authored several books,
including Elements of Positional Evaluation, The Improving Annotator,
The Traxler Counterattack, and Everyones Second Chess Book. He is a
member of the International Computer Chess Association and the author
of and teaches as Phillytutor on the Internet Chess Club.
We hope you enjoy Dan's new Chess Cafe column, Novice Nook...

Helping You through the Jungle

Novice Nook
Dan Heisman

THIS IS A NEW COLUMN oriented toward helping "adult beginners"

improve their play. As a full-time chess instructor, I have had lots of
opportunities to observe how these players do (and dont) improve, and I
would like to share some of this knowledge with you to help you improve
your play.
Like the other columnists at The Chess Caf, I welcome e-mail asking me
questions about my topic. I may not be able to answer all of them in my
column, but I assure you I will pick the most instructive questions and
answers and share them with you in future columns.
First, there are only a few things I can say with absolute certainty:
1. Everyone is different, and an exercise that may make most players
much better may not work as well for you. While most chess
instructors agree that certain basic concepts (like learning tactical
motifs) is necessary for improvement, their approach and learning
theories vary widely. There are also thousands of chess books, and
they range from incredibly helpful to counterproductive but, again,
some will swear by a particular book while another will think it was
a waste of time.
2. The media we are using is visual (words and diagrams). Some
players learn much better through this visual media, but other prefer
watching video tapes or by conversing live with an instructor. My
college roommate, who was an 1800 player, would have liked this
column. He used to say, "Dont tell me what I did wrong. Point to a
book with the information and I will read it myself at my own
speed."
3. I have a very large chess library, but I have not read every chess
book ever printed, nor visited every web site. I think it safe to say I

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have read most popular chess books that were in print in English
between 1965 and 1980, and a good percentage (comparatively) of
those afterward, but no one can claim to be an expert on every
source of information.
4. No one gets good at chess overnight. Sure, some develop more
quickly than others, but everyone can learn, and no one should get
frustrated just because they didnt make "expert" in two years.
5. If doing the work it takes to make chess better is not fun for you,
you almost undoubtedly wont do it.
6. I will do my best to help my readers improve.
Learning Chess
Before I jump right in and start making suggestions, it would be helpful if
my readers understood just a little about the learning chess. Most players
learn how to play chess in a very haphazard manner and continue to try
and improve in the same way. But we can break down this learning
process a little to help make it more understandable.
Improvement at almost anything requires theory and practice. Practice in
this case is playing chess, whether it be slow or fast, Internet or
over-the-board, against a human or computer. Theory is gaining
knowledge about chess, via media (books, software, web pages, videos,
etc.) or from chess instructors.
Compare learning chess with learning golf. Theory without practice is like
taking golf lessons without ever going out to play. It is unlikely you would
be very good no matter when you first stepped onto a real course.
Similarly, practice without theory has great limits. If you are slicing
because your hips are moving too early, guessing that your hands are
being held wrong is unlikely to fix your slice. So you need both: theory to
get new knowledge and practice to apply it until it works for you.
There is also an often overlooked "third dimension" to chess learning.
This involves a chess players thought process. Take ten beginning players
who were never taught to think correctly and they will approach the
problem of "finding the best move" ten different ways. But some ways of
thinking are much more effective and efficient than others. There are
theories on how you should think, and then it takes practice to think in a
new manner without it seeming obtrusive and less fun.
From the above, we can see what the content of a good column on chess
instruction should include (besides the above-mentioned answers to
readers questions):
1. Advice on how to improve which seems to work for most players.
Individual pieces of advice to help you find good moves are called
chess principles or guidelines.
2. Examples of typical problems most players have, how to recognize

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them, and how most players can eliminate them.

3. Direction to readers how they can find the theory for themselves
and learn to apply it for example, recommending books that
address certain aspects of learning.
Therefore, some of the information in this column will be aimed towards
helping the reader fix a particular weakness, like "Learning to Use Your
Rooks Well in the Opening", while other times we might discuss the
approach to learning endgames first, and yet other columns might deal
with "The first items you should consider when it is your move" or "What
are good things to know before you play in your first over-the-board
tournament?"
If it sounds like there are a lot of things that a column such as this one can
do, you are right! As I always tell my students, "If chess were that easy,
everyone would be an expert - and I would be out of a job!"
Safety and Activity
Alright already, you say, enough of the learning stuff. Now tell me
something that can help me beat Stewart next time I play him.
What I am about to tell you may sound simple, but it is likely the most
important piece of advice you will ever read in this column: There are
only two main principles in chess: safety and activity. Safety is much
more important than anything else, and activity is much more important
than anything but safety.
Wow! Tell me something else I dont know, you might say (sarcastically).
But almost all my students do not truly understand how powerful this
advice is. From it you can derive a very high percentage of chess
principles and guidelines. For example, "Move every piece once in the
opening before you move any piece twice (unless you can win material or
need to prevent losing it)" is just a guideline about activity.
Here is something else you might not know: the concept of safety is
directly related to the concept of activity. How so? Let me answer that
question by posing another one to make the answer obvious: Why do you
keep your pieces safe? So they can do something! (See Diagram)

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In this position from a club action

game, my opponent (Black) has made
some major mistakes and now I have a
large advantage. I gave this position to
Fritz 6 (one of the best software
programs), and on a 12-ply search (a
ply is a half-move, like Whites first
move without Blacks reply), it
preferred developing the Queens
Rook by over one-tenth of a pawn
compared to other moves. But I played
15.Rad1 almost instantly and won in
26 moves. It wasnt hard to arrive at
this move; I just felt something most of my students take a long time to
learn: the need to use all my pieces. I said to myself,
"I dont see any great tactics in the position, so I need to use my entire
army before starting a fight. The only piece that is really not doing
anything is my Queens Rook. I can either move it to c1 or d1. The
breakthrough to open lines in the future with d5 looks promising, so I
think I will put it on d1." So I did, and the Rook played a prominent part
in my breakthrough combination. This is activity a rook on a1 is doing
nothing and in a sense worth less than otherwise, so it is important to
activate it. It has been said that master instructor (and former Chess Caf
columnist) FM Sunil Weeramantry removes his students rooks during
practice if they do not activate them. Dont need them? Maybe next time.
Not active? May as well not be safe. No wonder Weeramantrys Hunter
Elementary team is constantly in the running for National Championships.
So what is safety? Perhaps you know it by its more advanced name:
tactics. At its most basic, safety involves the most basic tactic, counting,
as in counting to make sure a piece is safe. If no material is lost in a
possible transaction, then the involved pieces are safe; it material is lost,
then at least some of them are not. While in most positions counting is
easy, in some positions it can be quite difficult (See Diagram):

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This is a position from my first game

ever published in Chess Life back in
1968. White has just played 16 Bg5.
Black has sacrificed a Bishop on f2,
and is trying to win it back with a pin
on the f-file. However, after 16. Bg5,
during a very long think, one of the
many things I calculated was the
following "counting" sequence
involving both f3 and e7: 16...Nxf3 17.
Bxf3 Rxf3+ 18. Qxf3 Bxf3 19. Bxe7
Qb6+ Kxf3 and White seems to have
enough for his Queen. Therefore, after
thinking for about half an hour, I played 16...Qb6+ and won very nicely.
However, with the advent of accurate computer analysis 30 years later, I
finally found out that the correct capturing sequence was: 16...Bxf3! 17.
Bxf3 Nxf3 18. Bxe7 Nxe1+ winning quite easily, and the alternatives for
White turn out even worse for him. But there were so many capturing
permutations that over the years none of the many strong players who
were shown this game were able to determine exactly which sequence was
most accurate, even if they could move the pieces for a few minutes!
In order to be able to count material correctly is an accurate value of the
pieces. While it is true that the value of the pieces depends upon the
position, the average value is still important. I assume most of my readers
have not read IM Larry Kaufmans award-winning article about material
in the March 1999 issue of Chess Life. In his article Larry explained how
he used a 1,000,000+ game database to establish, for the first time, the
real average value of the pieces! Everything you have read previously was
based on pretty good estimates made by the best players in the world not
bad, but not exact. In honor of Fred Reinfeld, the prolific American
author, I call the most common set the "Reinfeld values": P = 1 pawn
(notice it is not 1 point. There are no points in chess, and it is a good idea
to keep in mind that in chess material can be measured in something that
is tangible, like pawns), N = B = 3 pawns, R = 5 pawns, and Q = 9 pawns.
But Larry found that (to the nearest quarter), the average value is actually:
The Kaufman values: N = B = 3.25 pawns, R= 5 pawns, and Q = 9
pawns.
Knowing these values is extremely important. For example, if you are
evaluating a position where one side wins the exchange (Bishop or Knight
for Rook), then they are winning 1 pawns, not two, and the exchange is
worth 1 divided by 3 or about half a piece, not 2/3 of a piece, which
you get using the Reinfeld numbers. Thus it is somewhat easier to get
compensation for the exchange than you may have thought. Larry also
found that having the Bishop pair, defined as having two Bishops when
your opponent does not, is worth, on the average, about a pawn
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"bonus".
Beyond counting, the next more complex level of safety is tactical motifs,
such as pins, forks, double attacks, and my personal favorite, removal of
the guard, and its cousin, the overworked piece. If you cant spot removal
of the guard almost instantly, pick up a basic book like Bains Chess
Tactics for Students and do the chapter on that motif until you can
recognize all the solutions within seconds.
Finally, we have the most difficult type of tactic, where a combination of
motifs are involved. Not surprisingly, this is called a "combination." All
good players have seen literally thousands of sound combinations and
have them in their memory, so that when they see a similar pattern during
their game, they can quickly spot the similarity and say to themselves,
"Hmm, that looks like that pattern I once saw where I win a piece; does it
work here? If so, maybe his piece isnt so safe."
Safety for activity, activity with safety. If you can do them both all the
time, you probably are a pretty good player already. Of course, mastering
them is not so easy, but that is another story...
Copyright 2001 Dan Heisman. All rights reserved.

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